TG #48

Hello!

Yes it has been a while, but surely we’ve all found wonderful new places to explore since then. It’s been deeply rewarding to see all the traffic clicking over on the website and that older articles are being found within the archives.

There’s an excellent quartet of articles coming your way, and embedded within them are several notable books, a primary school curriculum, and a fair bit more.

You can go deep in the oceans exploring shipwrecks – Mike Nash of DPIPWE has kindly shared the page outlining management and conservation of Tassie’s remarkably numerous wrecks.

You could fossick on the beaches – Miguel at Apple Isle Prospector has shared his knowledge of yet another unknown Tasmanian treasure – the jasper found on the north coast beaches at Penguin.

You can also climb high into the trees and camp out in a portable treehouse on Expedition Class – recently we’ve been climbing giant trees across the state with the Bookend Trust’s Andrew Hughes and beaming curriculum-linked educational programs to primary schools across the island. I’ve included some photosnaps from the adventure but do take a moment to view some of the video lessons posted by Andrew Hughes.

The Bookend Trust is also very soon hosting the Tasmanian Premiere if the multi-award-winning Sixteen Legs documentary film, in which we meet the ancient Tasmanian cave spiders. Narrated by and produced with the fantasy author Neil Gaiman, it’s been earning accolades at film festivals globally. It’ll be a pretty magical event, so do come along!

You can also enjoy the strange environments in the alpine zone and read the introduction to Dr. Jamie Kirkpatrick’s classic guide to our montane vegetation, Alpine Tasmania. You can also read the full text of this and three of his other books here at Tasmanian Geographic – Conservation Worrier, The Ecologies of Paradise, and A Continent Transformed. They’re all good reads – the first two bring a more personal touch to an ecologist’s story, and the last, a large-scale overview of geologically recent Australia. Jamie’s been a key inspiration for Tasmanian Geographic since before it even began – we’re especially glad to help share these excellent works in a new digital format.

If you’d like to download any of the books, they’re available by honesty-box donation to to help with ever-growing server costs.